Jesus the Bread of Life

Jesus the bread of life

John 6:35

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

I would like to share with you a principal that God taught me very early on in my walk with Him, and that is, if I will seek Him with all of my heart, I will find him and when I find him he will nourish my spirit.

There are many things that we look to in this world to bring us comfort, things like alcohol or drugs, relationships, movies, porn, animals, books to name a few but none of these things ever have any lasting effect on our lives. They have no power to bring lasting peace or contentment or even true love into our lives.

But Jesus can and does. He is able to come in and bring healing to our hearts in areas that have long been broken. He can help us to see things in ways that gives us a different outlook, and he most assuredly can develop our characters to reflect his Holy presence in our lives.

How does he do this you may be wandering?

I believe for me it started in my early twenties and I was in a very bad state emotionally and physically. I had tried numerous things in my life to dull the pain and self-loathing but nothing worked at all. When I woke up in the morning I was still the same hurting person I had been the previous day and so I would need to go back to those vices just to try to dull the pain once again.

Then one day I felt the tug of the lord at my heart again, I was living in England at the time and visited a few churches but they were just empty buildings. I did however find a bible study to start attending and when I joined them they were so loving and kind and accepting that I felt like I had come home.

It was strange because I did not know these people at all, but the bible says that those who believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, are a part of his body, we automatically become family, grafted into a network so large that it would stagger the mind to count everyone.

That for me was the beginning of my search for the lord again. I attended the study for as long as I could before I moved away from that little town and what began as a little ember in my spirit grew into a raging wild fire of discontent with the way I had been living my life.

The things that I had previously looked to for comfort and enjoyment no longer held any appeal but God and his precepts did. I soon realized that the things that I had looked to were empty and had literally kept me in bondage to sin, but God was doing a clean-up in my life that stripped that stuff away and replaced it with a new way of living and thinking.

I believe that God did this in a number of ways, and if you are willing to trust him for your life, you too will get to experience the sweet presence of the Lord in your daily lives.

Firstly he gave me a desire to read his word and I found myself hungry for him all of the time. Every chance I could get I was reading my bible the whole thing had come alive to me and I was being transformed by what I was reading.

Then the second thing that God showed me was that there were some things that I was doing in my life, habits that had formed, and attitudes that I had that did not line up at all with the word of God and his will for my life.

The bible says

1 John 1:9-10

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

I did just that and as the years went by whenever I felt that there were new things in my life that did not line up to the will of God for my life, I repented of those things too.

I found that when I had repented of the sinful things that I had been a part of for such a long time, they no longer had any appeal to me to do them again and I really wanted to please the Lord with my new life.

The third thing that I found was that the more I spent time praying and studying my bible and developing my relationship with the Lord, the more I wanted to find out about my Savior

The bible says that when we are born again in Jesus Christ we are new creations, the old man has now died and the new man now lives. That is truly how I felt.

2 Corinthians 5:17 – 21

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come; the old has gone, the new is here!

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

The forth thing that I learned throughout this process was that I was now God’s ambassador to all the people around me.

I was to share this good news that God had sent his son Jesus Christ into the world to die for the sins of the world. He promises that whoever acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God will be saved from his sins, and given eternal life. God promises never to hold the sins against the people who believe. Wow! What a great mission to be a part of, to share such good news with the world around us. I was called to be a part of reconciling the people who are lost in their sin, to God who promises forgiveness from sin and eternal life.

I joined various bible studies over the years and eventually became confident enough to actually start teaching bibles studies myself, even writing some and writing for my website about discipleship.

These are a few of the principles that God has taught me over the years that have kept me coming back to him daily. To learn and grow more and more in him, just like we need to be fed daily with food, so do we need the spiritual food that comes from walking with God.

These principles helped me to get to really know God and know that he was faithful to his word in the bible and because of that faithfulness I had a solid ground work to stand on when my precious husband was going through his cancer treatments.

I knew that I could go to God moment by moment if necessary to get comfort and peace throughout all of the process. Some days I went to him more often than I can count.

Then on other days when I did not have the strength to go to Him, He came to me and brought me a comforting word through someone or maybe it would be in something that I read that I knew that God was right there with me the entire time.

I was so glad that I had learned these principals all of those years ago, as it truly sustained me through the emotional ups and downs of living with a cancer patient.